A Prized Selection

Barack Obama was endorsed today in an especially cogent editorial by the newspaper that is a monument to Joseph Pulitzer, who funded the prizes for excellence in American culture and established the Columbia School of Journalism.

Obama, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch declares, “is right on the issues. He was right on the war in Iraq. He is right that all Americans deserve access to health care and right in his pragmatic approach to meeting that goal. He is right on tax policy, infrastructure investment, energy policy and environmental issues. He is right on American ideals.

“He was right when he said in his remarkable speech in March in Philadelphia that ‘In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand: that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.’”

Noting that they had backed John McCain in the Republican primaries, the Post-Dispatch editors conclude that then McCain “became the incredible shrinking man. He shrank from his principled stands in favor of a humane immigration policy. He shrank from his universal condemnation of torture and his condemnation of the politics of smear.

“He even shrank from his own campaign slogan, ‘Country First,’ by selecting the least qualified running mate since the Swedenborgian shipbuilder Arthur Sewall ran as William Jennings Bryan’s No. 2 in 1896.”